News tagged with electromagnetism

(Phys.org)—Two years ago, CfA astronomers reported the discovery of giant, twin lobes of gamma-ray emission protruding about 50,000 light-years above and below the plane of our Milky Way galaxy, and centered on the supermassive ...

The U.S. government is moving toward easing restrictions on airline passengers using electronic devices to listen to music, play games, read books, watch movies and work during taxiing, takeoffs and landings.

When galaxies collide, the central supermassive black holes that reside at their cores will end up orbiting one another in a binary pair, at least according to current simulations. Einstein's general theory of relativity ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed new technology and techniques for transmitting power wirelessly from a stationary source to a mobile receiver – moving engineers closer to their goal of creating ...

(Phys.org)—Quantum techniques have been demonstrated to offer improvements in areas such as computing, cryptography, and information processing, among others. But in a new study, researchers from IBM have proven that no ...

The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the Korea Railroad Research Institute (KRRI) have developed a wireless power transfer technology that can be applied to high capacity transportation systems ...

(Phys.org) —The design of the ITER blanket system, a crucial technology on the way to fusion power, has been approved and is now ready to proceed to the manufacturing stage. "The development and validation of the final ...

Terahertz (THz) radiation, a slice of the electromagnetic spectrum that occupies the middle ground between microwaves and infrared light, is rapidly finding important uses in medical diagnostics, security, and scientific ...

Two American physicists outline the role played by Austrian physicist Friedrich Hasenöhrl in establishing the proportionality between the energy (E) of a quantity of matter with its mass (m) in a cavity filled with radiation. ...

Electromagnetism

Electromagnetism is one of the four fundamental interactions in nature. The other three are the strong interaction, the weak interaction and gravitation. Electromagnetism is the force that causes the interaction between electrically charged particles; the areas in which this happens are called electromagnetic fields.

Electromagnetism is responsible for practically all the phenomena encountered in daily life, with the exception of gravity. Ordinary matter takes its form as a result of intermolecular forces between individual molecules in matter. Electromagnetism is also the force which attracts electrons to an atomic nucleus to form atoms, which are the building blocks of molecules. This governs the processes involved in chemistry, which arise from interactions between the electrons of neighboring atoms.

Electromagnetism manifests as both electric fields and magnetic fields. Both fields are simply different aspects of electromagnetism, and hence are intrinsically related. Thus, a changing electric field generates a magnetic field; conversely a changing magnetic field generates an electric field. This effect is called electromagnetic induction, and is the basis of operation for electrical generators, induction motors, and transformers. Mathematically speaking, magnetic fields and electric fields are convertible with relative motion as a four vector.

Electric fields are the cause of several common phenomena, such as electric potential (such as the voltage of a battery) and electric current (such as the flow of electricity through a flashlight). Magnetic fields are the cause of the force associated with magnets.

In quantum electrodynamics, electromagnetic interactions between charged particles can be calculated using the method of Feynman diagrams, in which we picture messenger particles called virtual photons being exchanged between charged particles. This method can be derived from the field picture through perturbation theory.

The theoretical implications of electromagnetism led to the development of special relativity by Albert Einstein in 1905.